


See Limon Run

by FrickenGreen



Series: A Slice of Limon [7]
Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, I gave Limon a family, JUST, also, crop tops implied, hurt/comfort but not really?, it's what he deserves, kind of?, limon running, the focus of the fic is really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:34:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25678186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrickenGreen/pseuds/FrickenGreen
Summary: Limon runs, see?
Series: A Slice of Limon [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1858369
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	See Limon Run

Limon’s earliest memory is of running away. 

He’s small. He’s always been small, but in this memory, especially so. His tiny legs pound across the white powdered sugar that coats the earth. Ghostly plumes rise up with each frantic stride. As his lungs stutter for breath, dust clings to his sticky skin and lodges in his throat. Limon chokes on the sugary taste, so sickly sweet in comparison to his medicinally flavored tears. He wants more than anything to stop running. Every muscle in his body aches. He’s never hurt this much before. But he can’t stop. If he stops, it’ll catch him.

Limon is running now. 

Perhaps he never stopped.

He’s older now. Faster. Still small, but no longer especially so. The dust can’t rise up to choke him now. It swirls around his calves, no higher, and he leaves each ghostly plume to fade into the night as he vaults through the darkness, his medicinally flavored body untouched by the sweet, powered earth. Dust doesn’t register in his panicked mind. 

His body still hurts. Perhaps he’s never stopped hurting. But the pangs barely register anymore. In the years since he was a child, he’s been kicked down full flights of stairs, whipped, had his ears boxed, kicked himself down full flights of stairs (out of fear of being kicked down full flights of stairs), slashed with swords, crawled on his hands and knees for weeks on end while covered in animal shit… Limon has grown accustomed to pain. 

Sugar dust doesn’t register to Limon. Pain doesn’t register. Nor do the alarmed shouts erupting from the darkness around him as torches are lit and swords are drawn. His panicked mind can only track one thing: the rapidly closing distance between him and the thing he’s running from. 

He pushes forward.

He remembers being that scared child, always a disappointment to his parents. A coward born to war heroes in a time of peace. A firstborn child with expectations set so high that his greatest accomplishment was the magnitude with which he failed to meet them.

In Limon’s earliest memory, he’s running from nothing. An imagined threat in broad daylight. A futile exercise in terror.

Tiny Limon twists his head behind him. He can’t see through the sugary dust clouds he’s kicked up, but he knows, oh how he knows, that he can’t run fast enough and it’s going to catch him. 

He collides with a hard wall and topples backward. His back slams against the earth, and his breath is pushed out of him. For a moment, he can do nothing except stare up at the blinding Bulb above. He can’t breathe. Is this how he dies?

“Whoa there, kiddo. You alright?”

Tiny Limon lowers his gaze from the Bulb, blinks spots out of his eyes, and sees that he didn’t run into a wall - he ran into a person. The round cookie bends down in her Bulbian robes and offers Limon a hand. Limon stares at the priestess, terrified of punishment. His breath comes back with a gasp. 

“I’m so sorry, your holiness!” he whimpers. The sugary dust lingers in the air and clogs his teary eyes. 

Now, Limon flees blindly through the darkness, blinking terrible visions out of his eyes. What horrors he’s seen this evening. 

Ceresian reinforcements rising against Castle Candy and the city below, striking down citizens right and left. 

Lord Cruller and his men, traitors all. Tearing down the banners of House Rocks and drowning them in blood.

King Amethar the Unfallen, plummeting from the highest parapet, mortally wounded, and crashing to the earth. Limon himself had seen the fallen king impact the sugary ground. He’d turned and fled before the dust could settle and reveal the mangled mess of the former king in the crater.

They’re dead. All of them, dead. And Limon will be next because he can’t outrun the terror that’s chasing him down. 

“Li-mon!” the voice taunts, frighteningly close. Limon can practically feel the warm, Bulbian breath on his neck, “Stop running, my sweet.”

“No need to apologize, my sweet,” the kind cookie croons. She lifts Limon to his tiny feet and brushes the dust out of his hair. “Where are your parents?”

Wordlessly, Limon points behind him, toward his parents’ sugar spinning shop.

“There’s no need to be afraid,” the cookie holds out her hand again and Limon takes it, “In Candia, our greatest strength is our sweetness. Did you know that?” 

Limon stares up at the Bulbian priestess as she takes him back to his parents. In sweetness, there is strength. He’s heard those words before. That’s the motto of the House of Rocks. His parents have it blazoned proudly above the entrance to their sugar spinning shop where they make sugar-spun weapons for the knights of House Rocks. But that motto has always rung strangely in Limon’s medicinal ears. 

“Mama,” he says later that night as his mother hammers the glowing-hot blade of a new sword. His mother has bandaged up his scrapes from his earlier fall and chided him for his cowardice. “In sweetness, there is strength,” he recites.

His mother pauses in her pounding rhythm and lifts her visor. 

“Yes, of course.” 

There is a jagged scar across her nose and cheek. She earned that scar in the Ravening Wars by being a hero, Limon has been told.

“I’m not sweet.”

His mom hesitates, then looks away. 

“I know.”

She lowers the visor and goes back to working the molten sugar. Tiny Limon flinches at the loud noise and spray of sparks.

In the darkness, with the ruckus of war and death closing in on him, Limon trips and crashes to the ground. His chin slams into the powdery dirt. The sickly sweet tang chokes him - well, that and the teeth that have just been knocked loose. 

“You never stop running, do you?”

Fearfully, Limon looks up to finally see who’s been chasing him. He gasps in recognition. 

“You?”

The Bulbian paladin comes to stand in front of Limon.

“I’ve been chasing you all the way from Comida,” the carrot brags. Even in the dark of night, his golden armor glows with the power of the Bulb.

Limon gulps down the sugary mess in his mouth and tries to make it as easy as possible to be killed. 

“...What are you doing?” Keridan asks. 

“Moving my hair out of the way so you can get a clear shot at my neck. I want it to be quick.”

Keridan kicks him in the side, knocking the breath out of him. 

“Get up. You’re more useful alive than dead.”

Limon can’t breathe. Is this how he dies?

Keridan grabs his arm and yanks him to his feet. Terrified, Limon allows himself to be led back to the castle, past dying Candian citizens, past fallen Candian warriors. 

He remembers the gentle guiding hand of the kind Candian cookie priestess when he was a child. 

In sweetness, there is strength. 

He remembers the sickly sweet tang of sugar dust, when he ran and ran and ran as a child. From nothing. Never stopping.

Now, Limon glances fearfully up at the murderous eyes of the Bulbian crusader. The sickly sweet sugar dust sits heavily in his stomach. It clings to his sticky, bloody skin. Castle Candy caramelizes and burns as its protectors fall. A terrifying thought occurs to Limon as he’s dragged forward.

Perhaps he wasn’t running from nothing as a child. 

Perhaps, he was running towards this.

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for NOTHING


End file.
